No cow is too sacred for me to piss on.  I’ve insulted Shakespeare, Hemingway, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Philip K. Dick.  Now I’ve finally worked up the courage to take on

Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion

There are a lot of things to like about this movie!  The animation is continually fresh and compelling, maybe even more so than in the TV series.  The characters aren’t developed any more from the original, and the main character (Homura, not Madoka) is even taken down a notch and made into more of a plot device, but they’re still good characters.  The plot builds on the fine structure of Madoka Magica, and it has three nice twists. In fact, this movie has everything going for it, except for the climax which everything else in the movie exists only to support. That part sucks.

But it sucks in an interesting and illustrative way.[page_break]

You can write a story, like a computer program, top-down or bottom-up.  Top-down means starting with the big picture:  the themes, the character arc, the target audience demographics.  Bottom-up means starting on the ground, with little pieces:  a lamppost in a forest (the image CS Lewis claimed began the Narnia chronicles), a hobbit-hole.

The top is where ideas have significance. The ground is where the concrete events that inspire emotions in monkeys happen.  Writers call the top-down writers “plotters” and the bottom-up writers “pantsers” (writing by the seat of their pants). (They probably call them something different in England.)

Stories written bottom-up have characters and story that develop naturally and feel real, but they often wander without focus and might not seem to have much of a point.  Stories written top-down have a tight plot structure, and a theme, if the author wants one, but their characters are often wooden and their events feel plotted.

Animators are visually-oriented people.  They think of scenes, or even of exactly how somebody turns his head when startled or jumps when she’s happy.  They’re trained to think this way; Walt Disney said every movement by every character must convey that character’s personality.

That’s why films made entirely by animators, like Double Rainboom or the short films of the Quay brothers, are beautiful and suck.  They start at the bottom and never look up.

If you start at the top, you’ve gotta connect to real, believable situations and events at the bottom. And that’s where PMMMtMPIII makes its epic, face-grinding fail.

The climax, where the story reaches out and grabs you, has to connect the top and the bottom.  Hamlet’s long-brooded rage bursts out in a sudden bloodbath, re-asking the question whether ‘tis nobler to suffer outrageous fortune, or by opposing end it.  Aslan is crucified killed, then resurrected, conveying Lewis’ theme that the Bible is true.  Darth Vader is what, you don’t know?.  The plotter can studiously tie together scenes and plot points according to the advice of Jack Bickham, but it won’t make anybody feel anything unless somewhere among the things on the bottom being connected together is a beating, bleeding heart.

PMMMtMPIII didn’t have that.

I know it didn’t have that because the climax was obviously written entirely, 100% top-down. The writer said, “At the climax, Homura has to die because it’s the only way to save Madoka, and Madoka has to die because it’s the only way to save Homura, and then the Power of Friendship will overcome all of the anybody having to die for anybody, because that is the most-emotional thing possible!” Then he spun out a bunch of Trekkish technobabble to pretend that was a coherent plot instead of three mutually-inconsistent statements.

The problem isn’t the technobabble or the logic.  The problem is the climax was planned entirely in the abstract and has no connection to real events or necessities. The abstract conditions the climax was supposed to meet were not even theoretically possible of being realized in any concrete reality, but even if they had been possible, the climax still would have sucked, because there was no blood in it.  There was no concrete image or event that inspired the climax.  Only the abstract idea that these girls really really loved each other.

That’s not a story.  That’s a mission statement.  It didn’t make sense because there was no ‘there’ there, in the same way that an action scene description might make no sense if the author never bothered to figure out where everybody was standing.

If you’re a huge anime nerd, you’re probably already in the comment box typing furiously: “... but the exact wording of Homura’s wish in episode 10 means that…”  Just stop. I don’t give a shit.  I don’t care if you can cobble up a post-hoc logical explanation.  I’m not even going to talk about the third plot twist where Homura becomes a demon (which the writer complained bitterly about being forced to write), because the movie had already crashed and burned by that point.  Nobody in the world watched that movie, followed the logic of your brilliant explanation and understood as a consequence the true tragedy of PMMMtMPIII.  No; they followed the tears and shouting of the magical girls and understood the only thing that the writer had understood:  These girls are all willing to die for each other.  And then they cried.

Or not.